Poem December 11, 1976 Issue

THAT WHICH ABIDES

Doris Peel

The child that shall lead them
is not (however winningly portrayed)
scaled to conform
to the infantile
or the juvenile;
is not truer by virtue of being smaller;
not a mortal in miniature—

since the leopard and the lion
are no more apt to be found lying down
in a nursery or a kindergarten
than in halls of state
or centers of learning.

O what must lead
to the Peaceable Kingdom
is innocence itself!

Not that appearing
(so brief and perishable)
of the "clouds of glory" envisioned by poets
as trailed into exile by the newly born—
but an innocence having
nothing whatever to do
with age or size or transiencies of bloom,
enduring (as it must) at the very core
of every creature here upon earth:
no matter how embittered
or estranged or spent;
how far-away-gone from a cradled start
in a forgotten dawn.

A child abides.

The Fathered, the Mothered,
the ineffaceable one

only waiting—waiting—to be recalled
(from this drawn-out dream of a jungled world)
and so, itself being led, to lead
all ravening beasts
and desperate men
most gently and sweetly home again.

Doris Peel

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